IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - September 2023 - 55

Coraluppi
1969. I watched the moon landing from a tv in the common
room of a women's college dormitory. I nonchalantly
relegated this astonishing feat of astronautical
engineering to the category of " of course they can do
it " because I somehow thought that would impress the
ladies. My penance for that bonehead comment, which
betrayed what I really thought, was to spend my career
working with engineers. Summer of '69 over, I returned
to Mizzou.
By the time I graduated from Mizzou in 1970, I knew
First born, a bridge, and Stanford (1982).
on his porch and stopped at the front door. The porch
was filling up behind us. What now? We looked at each
other. We had a choice-open the door or ring the doorbell.
He rang the doorbell. The president opened the
door himself. I learned two things instantly: one was
that I was a very lucky young man, for behind him and
nearly out of sight were four state troopers, armed. The
other was that the president was a remarkable man,
with no small measure of courage. We talked and disbursed,
all very peacefully. I soon found out that someone
took a picture of me sitting on the porch and it was
published in a local paper of some kind. I never saw it
myself, but it seemed like everyone else did. I graduated
in 1970, in part because a man rang a doorbell.
Had he opened the door instead, the state troopers
would have pounced. Enough said.
Stefano: What brought you to NUWC in 1970 and what
are your best memories of your time there? What were the
major challenges? Tell us a bit about the projects on which
you worked.
Roy: Well, you would not be at all surprised to hear me
say that I got there by accident. I had two summer
intern jobs, the first was the summer of 1969. One evening
in the spring of that year, I was wandering around
Jesse Hall (the admin building at Mizzou) after hours
with more than one beer in me. How did I get in? The
door was unlocked! Anyway, I bumped into a set of
mail slots and grabbed onto a brochure from the U.S.
Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory (USN/USL) in
New London, CT. It was a summer intern job. In that
state, I recall thinking it might be fun to work underwater.
I knew better the next morning, but I applied anyway.
They accepted. I had $50 in my name, so I used
the offer letter to borrow enough money to get me to
my first paycheck. You would not be surprised by now
to hear I did not care for the job, but the size of my first
" real " paycheck astounded me. This was the summer of
SEPTEMBER 2023
that I liked having money in my pocket and needed a
break from being a student. The booming economy of
the 1960s had gone bust, and finding no jobs, I reluctantly
returned to NUWC for my second summer intern
job. I told myself that by the end of the summer, I will
find a permanent job. That did not happen the way I
expected because no one was hiring. My NUWC supervisor
noticed me though and noticed that I could write
well, so he was able to convert my summer intern job
into a full-time position. A hiring freeze hit two weeks
later. Once again, I was very lucky. I could not have
found a better job, but it took me several years to figure
that out, and many more years to fully appreciate my
good fortune. The men (yes, all men) were tough but
fair, and tolerated sloppy work very poorly. I was not
very likable, but I was able to do what they wanted done
and write about it clearly too, which I think surprised
them. The first two years or so I was doing raytracing for
underwater acoustic propagation. It was my first encounter
with asymptotics. I recall too well the sad day I suggested
the speed profile should be modeled as a random
variable. Enough said. I moved on to more open-minded
groups. In time there came the magical day when I found
I could do things others did not know how to do. This
ledtoanencounterwithamanwho allfeared. Hewas
an exceptionally talented structural acoustician. I was
warned that he was combative and ran over people who
he felt did not measure up. I was sent to talk to him, not
knowing what to expect. He looked me up and down (I
was 26), chomped on his lit cigar (allowed in offices in
the 1970s), and growled that he never expected to need a
mathematician to do his job. To which I replied instantly
that I never thought I would need an engineer to have a
job. At that, he bit his cigar practically in half. He took a
moment, grinned in a devilish way, and invited me into
his office, whereupon I was gifted with a marvelous onehour
extemporaneous lecture on structural acoustics. (It
was a kind of an in-depth interview, but I passed.) His
engineering vision was blocked by the need to solve certain
large dense generalized Hermitian eigenproblems.
In those days, most numerical analysts thought that an
order 10 matrix was pretty big, but his problems were of
order several hundred. Solving them with the available
computer resources was fun. We were friends to the end
of his days, though after a few years, we never worked
IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
55
IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - September 2023

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